


let me down easy, before you go

by callmefairyofthesea



Series: just because it's temporary doesn't mean it's worth less [7]
Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Break Up, Friendship, Gar didn't even want to fall in love, Gen, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, but now that he's here he doesn't want to let go, the rest of the team is around and actually gets a few lines in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29741664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmefairyofthesea/pseuds/callmefairyofthesea
Summary: When the team finally returns to Earth, Gar grapples with the complications of falling in love, especially when it was supposed to be temporary.Set in the same universe as "no man is an island."
Relationships: Beast Boy/Aqualad, Garth/Garfield Logan
Series: just because it's temporary doesn't mean it's worth less [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2185842
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	let me down easy, before you go

**Author's Note:**

> Of *course* I had to write the fall-out of this relationship. They could be a very healthy, long-lasting couple, but not in this universe. Not when Gar’s still hung up on his future with Raven, and his easy relationship with Garth stops being easy~

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love.

It’s all Gar can think, all of June while he’s stuck in space too far away from cold-water hands and black sclera.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love for _real,_ because he knows three years forward, and he _likes_ three years forward, but Aqualad makes him giddy in the ‘right now’ and desperate to hold onto this summer forever. He knows he can’t. Objectively, he knows that long-distance makes him oscillate between clingy and distant, because his brain forgets the things that aren’t literally in front of him.

Aqualad’s three galaxies gone, and every day that Gar wanders the debris-filled palace around the rebuilders and guards, it gets a little harder.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love, and the guilt gets harder to swallow when he opens his communicator and sees the _no signal_ screen glare at him. Because they left Jump in kind of a hurry, because he didn’t get to say goodbye, because he forgot to call until they were already outside the Milky Way.

Aqualad probably understands that. He probably understands that missions pop up inconveniently, and sometimes those missions are in space because Gar’s teammate is split between blood and water family. At least, Gar hopes he understands that when the calendar rolls into July, a full month of radio silence.

Aqualad’s been jerked around before, even _said_ that he wasn’t looking for someone who couldn’t commit, and Gar is not trying to ignore him. He’s not.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love, and something about the distance makes him fall harder. Maybe it’s the literal weeks of waiting around after Ryand’r takes the throne, after the funeral, after Kori and Blackfire are stuck in negotiations that Gar doesn’t need to be around for. Maybe it’s too much free time to replay memories on repeat and idealize the shit out of Aqualad’s smiles.

Maybe it’s remembering weekends together, leaned up inside that briny, blue-glow grotto and scrambling to dunk each other’s heads underwater. Maybe it’s talking about the stupidest day-to-day nothings, the way that Aqualad laughs so hard that his gills snort. Maybe it’s that they’re not knotted up with five years of same-team dynamics, and it’s so damn easy to love uncomplicated things. After Trigon, time travel, the Brotherhood, and an alien war, Gar thinks he deserves something easy.

Aqualad deserves something easy.

Which Gar knows he is not after his responsibilities tear them apart.

It would be easier if Kori was around to talk to, but she’s wrapped up in alien politics. Gar refuses to pull her away from the handful of hours outside of meetings that she has with her brother, especially when Ry looks like panic personified, like separation anxiety stuffed inside gold skin with white scars.

Actually, it would be easier if literally any of the team was around to talk to.

Gar figures Dick is busy holding Kori together (he’s glad one of them is doing it), and he can guess why Tara goes missing every time Raven leaves the room. He’s got Vic, which is something, but Vic talked him through his depression after Paris, and Gar needs a little bit of space from that breakdown.

God, he needs space from Paris.

He knew it was coming, but Steve still smacked him back into feeling like he was eight and useless. Self-worth contingent on T-rexes and finished missions, and Vic knows Gar a little too well. Gar’s told him all about Upper Lamumban flashbacks and abandoned families, the late-night espresso that Raven watered down with rejection, that Tara being back (but not because of Gar) stings a lot too much.

So Gar is avoiding him because he just wants _easy._

Which means that Gar is mostly alone for most of June with just his memories for company.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love.

And when they pack themselves into the T-ship a week and a half into July, finally going home after finalizing peace treaties and promises, Gar realizes he really, really wants to tell him.

* * *

“ _Are you okay_?” Aqualad asks as soon as Gar gets a connection a few miles over California, sometime around sunset with the ocean like fire beneath him. July eleventh, seven o’clock, and it’s nice to be around familiar. One moon and normal tides and skies that aren’t purple or crimson.

It feels like home.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

“ _I’m just glad you’re safe. KF said you guys were on Tamaran. I guess he was watching over Jump for you?_ ”

“Yeah. Yup. I think Robin worked something out before we left, which makes me look like an asshole because I forgot to even call you.” Gar looks out his pod window toward the reflection of orange and purple, the riptides that run toward Atlantis and away from Titan Tower. “The last month has been a shitshow. I don’t know where to start.”

“ _Heard you stopped an uprising, though_.”

“Ha. That’s one word for it. I’ll tell you all about it as soon I see you in person.”

“ _Ah._ ”

“What?”

“ _About that._ ”

“What?” Gar repeats, feeling so _freaking_ glad that his headset is on mute, that no one else can hear him. He wasn’t supposed to fall in love, and now Aqualad’s voice is way too reserved and distant for what Gar wanted to come home to.

“ _League asked us to go undercover for a few weeks. I, um. I probably won’t see you until we get back._ ”

“Shit.”

“ _I’m sorry._ ”

“Nah, it’s fine—it’s, I mean, it _sucks,_ but we’re heroes. It’s part of the job description.” Gar replays the sentences in his head and snorts. “I mean, I’m kind of pissed the League ignored us for five years and now they want to send you on ‘undercover missions’ but—”

“ _Maybe I shouldn’t go,_ ” Aqualad says, his voice all scratchy with static and panic, like he knows just as well as Gar that another couple of weeks might end this infinite summer of escape into the ocean tides. “ _The team would understand if I_ —"

“I can’t let you do that. I mean, I just went to space for a month, so I can’t ask you to miss out on a _League_ mission.”

“ _Are you sure?_ ”

“Yeah. Actually—” Gar can see the Tower’s silhouette sharpening in the distance. Dick is talking in the headsets, asking Vic to land. “I think I have to go. Can I call you in a few hours?”

“ _A few hours? Shit, we’re leaving at eight, and it’s supposed to be covert ops. Offline._ ”

“Damn,” says Gar, drumming his hand over the unmute button, not clicking it yet. With the ocean right below him, tall waves with memories and no Aqualad, he can feel the tears welling up. A hard knot in his throat.

He’s not supposed to say _I love you_ over the comms.

“ _We knew it would be like this,_ ” Aqualad says after a second. “ _We knew I’d go back, and this would be long-distance._ ”

“I know.” Gar swallows hard. “It’s just—I miss you.”

Long-distance wasn’t this hard before Gar went to space. They had free days all summer, like the world was still recovering from the Brotherhood and no one wanted to shake up the snow globe that was temporary peace.

Gar could fuck off to East Coast whenever he wanted, and no one knew when Aqualad was at the Tower, smiling like a secret with his long hair tangled in Gar’s fists, holding their breath every time they heard footsteps. They could disappear for hours on good days, shouting at the clouds at the top of their lungs, Aqualad’s arms wrapped tight around Gar’s pterodactyl throat, chasing the sunrise until they both tumbled into the ocean, exhausted. Aqualad kissing Gar’s tired chest, half-lidded eyes as he floated them back to shore.

The bittersweet smile is louder than the silence. “ _Yeah. Me too._ ”

“ _Beast Boy, come in._ ” Dick’s voice. Impatient.

“I have to go. I’ll—I’ll wait for you to call me.”

“ _As soon as I get back._ ”

* * *

Gar wasn’t supposed to fall in love, but now that he’s actually head over heels in saltwater, he wants to _actually tell_ his stupid boyfriend. And he can’t _do that_ because the middle of July is just waiting around for Aqualad to call. For Aqualad to get back. For Aqualad to tell him about his super-secret, super-cool League mission and how it’s not as awesome as underwater make-outs.

Except, you know, it’s two weeks before that happens.

“Long-distance sucks,” he tells Raven, sitting on his usual rock while skipping stones. Midnight. Humidity barely tempered by the ocean breeze, silver moonlight skipping over water foam.

Raven is meditating a few yards away, face pinched up with concentration which means she’s mulling something over, and Gar likes that she talks more when she’s chewing on a problem.

It’s been a hot second since they’ve spent time together, and Gar knows it’s his fault. After time travel got him obsessed with _potential,_ after Raven talked to him across continents and through homesickness during the war, he needed the space to get over her. Over what he thinks they have together because he promised not to force it.

And anyway, Gar needs space to process the loneliness of secrets he doesn’t get to tell anyone. Mostly to process the unresolved anger he’s got toward the Doom Patrol and the Brotherhood and figure out how _that_ version of himself fits with _this_ version of himself fits with the _future_ version of himself.

Raven’s face goes a little more pinched. “Tell me about it.”

After the last few months of double-punches, Gar has been so wrapped up in his own shit that he forgot. That Raven. Dates. _Blackfire._

And they just came back from Tamaran.

And present Gar is not supposed to know it.

“I really miss my boyfriend,” he says instead. Self-absorbed because it’s an easy persona to throw on when he needs to.

She just hums and goes back to meditating, frowning so hard that Gar thinks she probably wants to be alone.

“Long-distance sucks,” he tells Kori at the mall, shredding his pretzel apart, not eating it, just tossing the crumbs into the nacho cheese tray with his half-spilled Boba tea.

“Agree,” she sighs, collapsing back in her red plastic chair. “The conference calls are not quite the same as in person.”

“How’s Ry?”

“At the moment, okay. The treaties are currently strong enough to prevent another uprising.”

“Twenty bucks the next uprising is Blackfire.”

“ _Gar._ ” She smacks his leg, but he laughs because he gets it now. How three years changes her.

“Kidding.”

Two weeks is a long time to build the reunion up in his head, and it’s purposely naïve. Clinging on to this relationship while it’s burning itself out, but March until now has been a soft daydream, the kind of easy love that Gar refuses to give up.

So when two weeks turns to three because Gar gets deployed to Texas to help Titans South set up, he pretends it’s fine.

This is fine.

He’s in love with the sound of Aqualad’s voice on the communicator now, an abstract concept instead of a person, and he’d be _fine_ if it weren’t for time zones. And supervillains crashing their virtual dates. And broken communicators. And buffering video links.

“ _I’ll try to get some time off,_ ” Aqualad says at three in the morning over the comms, barely a whisper and a breath as he dozes off in the middle of their thrice rescheduled date, and Gar doesn’t blame him because he’s already asleep in his sewer-stained uniform, hair matted with Plasmus goo.

“ _Hot Spot thinks it’s funny you wanted him on your team,_ ” Gar tells him at six am, kicking his feet on some dusty weeds and wishing that Titans South would stop redoing their Tower blueprints, that they’d let the construction crew get started so that Gar can go home and see his boyfriend.

“ _You ever think you’d join Titans East?_ ” Aqualad asks, so casual that it’s not. Like he knows what Gar will say and hopes he’s wrong, like maybe it would be easier if they moved in together.

Gar chokes on his answer and realizes this isn’t working.

He wasn’t supposed to fall in love, and it hurts.

They get a weekend together at the end of July. Gulf of Mexico, holo-ringed on the white beach. As soon as Gar sees the smooth line of black hair and broad shoulders, he sprints past the tourists, tripping over sand, getting salt and sweat in his eyes, already sunburned from waiting three hours in nothing but swim trunks and anxiety. But he runs until they collide and hangs onto Aqualad’s waist like he’s afraid he’ll disappear.

“Oh my god,” Gar says, kissing the ocean salt off his chapped lips, pressing his ear into that familiar heartbeat. “I can’t believe you’re actually here.”

Aqualad sounds different in person than he does over voice calls, and that makes everything worse. “Did you get taller?”

“Perks of dating a shapeshifter.” And Gar just laughs into the crook of Aqualad’s neck, refusing to let go, knowing that they both know this is goodbye. Knowing that they’ve got one weekend to bury their relationship in sand and underwater graves, but Gar doesn’t want to admit it first.

So he holds on.

He holds on until his laughter sounds like sobbing.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I’ve been in a long-distance relationship with my partner for five years, so this story is *not* supposed to discourage anyone from being in a long-distance relationship. They involve a lot of planning and compromise and communication and (for most people) a set date at which the relationship is no longer long-distance. 
> 
> Unfortunately for Gar, neither of them is interested in leaving their team. And superheroes’ schedules are a *little* busier than mine.


End file.
